


Of the Snow Queen, Poor Parenting, and Social Workers

by orphan_account



Category: Sneedronningen | The Snow Queen - Hans Christian Andersen
Genre: Canon Divergence, Gen, Modern AU, Satire, helicopter parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-04 16:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5340008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A satire utilizing a beloved fairy tale to prove a point about helicopter or overly involved and protective parenting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of the Snow Queen, Poor Parenting, and Social Workers

**Author's Note:**

> My apologies to Hans Christian Andersen for butchering his story. This was written for a class assignment where we had to take a classic fairy tale and twist to it make either a satire or parody, hopefully proving a point in the process.

The town of Odense, Denmark, was a labyrinth and microcosm. Elbowroom was not valued there at all. People lost themselves in the catacombs of streets every day, never to be found, seen, or heard from again. Thus, the parents of the town thought it a good idea that children should never be allowed to wander.  
After all, they reasoned, so-called “free-range” parenting endangered the lives of angelic children. Nothing good could possibly come from letting kids leave such an insular community.

  
In one such house, of one such resident of parochial inclinations, there lived Grandmother Fyn and her grandchildren - Kai (not “Kay” - that was too Anglicized and, thus, microaggressive) and the younger Gerda (naturally the apple of her guardian’s eye.) Together, the young ones bore a great curse right out of a fairy tale. They wanted to learn everything about the world. Curiosity may kill a cat, or so they say, but Kai and Gerda Fyn were sure that satisfaction brought it back. The grandmother hated this curiosity, and so, always lied to the children.

  
Every winter, snow fell from the sky (it was Denmark, after all) and yet, the kids knew nothing of what snow felt like. Was it cold, or hot - tepid perhaps? Soft, or hard? Slick, or bumpy?

  
No one knew because the adults, in their perpetual fear, worried too much about hypothermia to let the youths play in the white dust. Even the name “snow” was too dangerous, according to the dense minds of Odense, because it might encourage children to go outside.

  
It was a twisted, convoluted mindset that prevailed.

  
One day, Kai grew curious about the forbidden white flurries and dared to ask his grandmother what they were.

  
“Those are swarms of white bees,” the grandmother answered. For a woman who hated imagination, she surprisingly had no qualms using it to her own benefit. Hypocrisy in its finest form. Never once did it occur to the grandmother that bees were far more dangerous than, say, dashes of little snowflakes.

  
Thinking her words were good enough for the little boy, the grandmother returned to reading a 1929 edition of McClure’s Magazine (no one ever said the grandmother was hip with the times). Kai, with Gerda as his accomplice, chose to let his imagination wander to dangerous places. Surely, the children reasoned, if regular bees had a queen bee, then these white “snow bees” must have a snow queen.

  
Remember that story, dear reader.

  
See, whenever the old grandmother grew sick of hearing such fantasies, she slipped her children barbiturates. When she gave Kai and Gerda their dose during the Snow Queen epoch, their highly active minds were fueled by clonazepam-induced hallucinations. They saw a joint mirage of the Snow Queen dancing on their window sill.

  
In reality, it was just a snowflake illuminated by the day’s dying light, but who was going to say that to two drugged adolescents in a flight of fancy?

  
(Well, this author would, but this author doesn’t have kids and certainly isn’t a psychotic smothering mother so that is irrelevant.)

  
Soon enough, the snow faded, and spring came rapping on the door. Kai and Gerda Fyn were forbidden from playing during the spring as well because of rain! Pollen! Allergies! The Fyn children entertained themselves by reading books approved by the local helicopter parents. Currently, Kai and Gerda were feigning interest _7 Habits for the High Effective Shut-In._

  
Now, the funny thing about the passage of time is that people change as they grow older, particularly young boys. Kai slowly became aware of his life, of how different Odense might be in comparison to the countries he read about. His grandmother tried to convince him that he was being silly and convince herself that nothing was occurring in her obedient, precious, blind follower. Gerda, too, knew that something was different and asked Kai why.

  
“I simply feel a shooting pain in my heart - an ice shard.”

  
“You’re silly,” Gerda replied with a giggle. Her brother had recently been caught in a phase where he adored poetry and prose. Only figurative words, Kai would say, could possibly understand the angst he experienced.

  
Spring blossomed into summer, which melted in autumn. In the season of harvest, the true problems of Kai’s metamorphosis began to show themselves.

  
He took to reading books thatwould give his grandmother a coronary, had she known. His bookshelf was lined with masterpieces like Thomas Paine’s _Common Sense_ , Plato’s _Republic_ , or René Descartes’ _Meditations_. The more books Kai devoured, the more insatiable his curiosity became, and the expanse of his wisdom became vast. With Kai’s evolution came a brazen flippancy and blatant disregard for the rules of the town.

  
The general consensus of the nattering women was, “What child would ever rail against our concerned cultivation?”

  
Most children would, if they had any sense of independency.

  
Kai, in his roguishness, took to mimicking the oppressed mother hens and pointing out their numerous flaws. Bespectacled and hunched over a gnarled cane, Kai would lecture his peers. He would remind them about the dangers of leaving home. He would screech tiresome rhetoric at them.

  
“How dare you set foot off your front step!”

  
“What are you doing out of your home? You could catch Kuru from one of your neighbors! They’re cannibals!”

  
“Oh, no! You breathed in fresh air!”

  
It was quite fun, until his grandmother found out what Kai was up to. After that, Old Lady Fyn tossed all of Kai’s rebellious materials out into the trash and gave him a long lecture about the dangers of dressing up. During that speech, Gerda had succumbed to fits of giggles and took to heckling her brother.

  
“I spy with my little eye a skirt wearing Kai!” She shrieked at him, before darting away in good humor.

  
Their grandmother, per usual, did not see the humor of the situation.

  
“Kai Fyn,” Grandmother barked. “See what you’ve done! That laughter is dangerous. Next thing you know, Gerda will be laughing while doing drugs.”

  
“I don’t think that’s how jocularity works,” Kai quipped, glancing up from his illicitly gained copy of _Commentarii de Bello Civili_ , careful to keep the title covered. There was nothing quite like reading a book about a civil war while waging one within his own home. Pushing off of the hard wooden chair, Kai sauntered out of the house before his grandmother could respond with her barbed tongue.

  
It was November, turning over to December, and therewas a healthy dose of frost and snow powdering the ground outside. With the return of winter, Kai nurtured ideas that were certainly not acceptable - ideas that could wind him up under a rigorous home schooling curriculum if he was not careful. There were waters, though, that Kai had to test, regardless of any consequences.

  
Through less-than-savory means, Kai acquired a snowboard, and tormented the town by riding around on it each day. The blond rebel was causing quite a stir with the copiously concerned cows of the city, and none of the asphyxiating lunatic mothers could stop him.

  
The snowboard gave him freedom to zing around the city, down narrow alleys to emerge on the other side of town. He could dash between two walking mothers, prompting them to launch back in fear of the “deranged Fyn boy,” as they called him behind Grandmother Fyn’s back. His rambunctious terrorizing of the town masked a far more conniving scheme that was brewing like a hurricane in his head.

  
With age and independence came a strong will. With his will, came a shrewd intelligence that allowed Kai to plot a master plan.

  
In this day and age, it isn’t hard to make contact with a social worker. In fact, it’s quite simple with Bing (not Google; that was too mainstream, and Kai was experiencing a hipster phase). Just type in a query in the search engine, and there are solutions.

  
Winter was at its apex when Kai went out to meet his contact. Grandmother Fyn had become insufferable, far too suffocating, and was proselytizing to her grandchildren. Frankly, it was disquieting just how tight the noose had grown around Kai and Gerda. It was up to Kai to set himself and his innocent lamb of a sister free from their strangling grandmother.

  
Hence, the social worker comes into play. The meeting point with the social worker was an old mountain in the north, near Spitsbergen. When Kai introduced his idea with Gerda, he found that she would have to be egged into coming. Naïve as Gerda was, she was coated with the grandmother’s spell. The only way Kai could get to her involved him borrowing an idea from the old fascist herself.

  
“We’re visiting the Snow Queen, who will let us be ourselves without any rules,” he lied.

  
Gerda was not fully convinced. “The Snow Queen?”

  
“Yes,” Kai said, grasping his sister by the shoulders and staring into her pale blue eyes. “Remember the story Grandmother told us of the snow bees and how they have a queen?” Gerda nodded. “Well, that’s who we’re meeting.”

  
“In a palace of ice filled with snowmen?” Gerda’s eyes glistened with tears of joy.

  
“Of course.”

  
Who would have thought the grandmother’s clonazepam-induced fable would be useful?

  
It was the Snow Queen/social worker’s idea to use the journey to Spitsbergen as a way to unfold Gerda’s mind. She called on her colleagues to turn the journey into an imaginative trip. One worker was to be a sorceress that housed Gerda for a night; a married couple pretended to be royalty that taught Gerda the value of having a choice; “robbers” were really bus drivers giving Gerda a ride to Lapland, where, finally, two kind college students would show Gerda the value of honesty as they took her to Spitsbergen.

  
The _piece-de-resistance_ was Kai. To escape his grandmother, the “Snow Queen” feigned kidnapping him. This prompted Gerda to chase after her beloved elder brother.  
The journey went as intended. Along the way and in the midst of a nippy winter, Gerda realized that answering only to her grandmother was about as healthy as the frostbite forming on her toes. It (the answering, not the frostbite) was far from conducive to survival. In fact, if Grandmother had her way, Gerda would not go and save her brother. Gerda was already exuding choice.

  
Finally arriving at Spitsbergen, Gerda’s mind was a blossoming lotus flower fully taking in the real world for the first time. Reunited with Kai, Gerda wept tears of joy and thanked the Snow Queen.

  
“Oh, how I love this!” Gerda howled, realizing that her life was drastically different free from the grasp of her helicopter grandmother.

  
“You’d best,” Kai said, pulling her in for a warm embrace. “Freeing you was shockingly expensive.”

  
The blunt honesty was liberating. Reality was enlightening. The world beyond Odense was illustrious and illuminating.

  
Needless to say, Kai and Gerda never went back. Gerda herself went into social work, while Kai became an advocate for free range parenting. One day, seeing her grandson on the news, Grandmother Fyn finally had a long-awaited coronary and keeled over. It was a morbid, but fitting justice that helped bring helicopter parenting to a much-needed end.


End file.
